Here's What Happens to Society When Everyone's a Jerk Online

Linguist and UC Berkeley professor Geoff Nunberg on what happens when we're all dicks on the internet, what "socialism" really means these days, and President Trump's disregard for the rules of capitalization.

Geoff Nunberg thinks deeply about words: the way they're used, the information they convey, and the impact they have on our ability to connect and communicate. If that sounds dry or ponderous, let the profane teenager trapped deep inside you be delighted by the fact that he wrote an entire book on the word "asshole."

That book—called Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years—was excerpted in a 2012 Salon piece titled “Trump, Jobs, Zuckerberg: We Idolize Jerks.” In it, the linguist and UC Berkeley professor deftly unpacks our society's fascination with high-achievers whose success and popularity is tethered to a particular brand of dickishness—George Patton, Steve Jobs, and, yes, Donald Trump. (“There have been eras that took a far more intense interest in spectacles of cruelty than ours, but none that was so transfixed by watching people act like assholes," he writes.) He also observes the increasing hostility of 2012 comment threads and makes a prediction that, seven years later, seems eerily prescient: Though people might never be comfortable doing their best screaming Steve Jobs impression in the check-out line at the grocery store, they would become increasingly comfortable being a snarky jerk online. (Bingo!)

Reading it now, what becomes clear is that Nunberg isn't just studying the ins and outs of language. He's using it as a lens to better understand the ways in which our society and culture is evolving. So at a time when language is facing significant change—emojis are used in place of sentences; words are misused, overused, or employed without respect for historical context; email exclamation points are at an all-time high—I wanted to ask Nunberg what the social and cultural costs of those changes might be.

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I was watching a segment you did on The Colbert Report, in 2006, and you were detailing how what once would have been a civil politics conversation about, say, what role government should play in the economy had basically turned into a shouting match. That seems very prescient. I’m curious what signs you were seeing then that made you maybe think it would lead to the moment we’re at now.I wrote a book called Ascent of the A Word in 2013. “Assholes” is an interesting category, because it's an intimate category. An asshole is the neighbor who's playing music at 3:00 in the morning, right? Saddam Hussein was not someone you’d call an asshole. He’s a bad person, but “asshole” suggests a intimate relationship. It engenders the kind of anger you feel towards your intimates within the family. That's the particular tone of indignation that I hear on Fox, I see in the comment threads on Twitter—people are angry at each other in the way they're angry at the asshole neighbor. And there's a sense in which, yeah, the internet makes that possible.

There used to be a clear distinction between public and private in our communication. In John Dewey’s "The Public and its Problems” in 1927, Dewey says something like, “Public opinion comes in through the eye, but it doesn't really take form until it's validated by the ear.” In that era—pre-radio even—you read it and then you talked it over at the water cooler. Now, there's this continuum, from public to private communications, where there's this whole body of [communications that are] not public, but in public. You tweet, and you're not really public unless you're the president or you have thousands of followers on Twitter, but it's something you're doing in public. There are these degrees of self exposure.

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Of course, Trump talks about people in public as he would in private. But, in general, that's what happens with this media. It used to be that if you wanted to be an asshole, you basically had to write on the wall of the bathroom. Now the whole world is a bathroom wall. As I wrote in that book, I don't think there are more assholes in the world than there were 50 years ago, but there are certainly a lot more opportunities for acting like one.

The whole thing about assholes is that you have permission to be an asshole to an asshole, right? The most interesting sentence of the last 30 years is “Mind your manners, asshole.” If you're telling someone to mind their manners, you're being an asshole. The Dirty Harry movies basically invented that maneuver. They constructed the enemies or the criminals to be assholes, so that Clint Eastwood had a right to be an asshole back to them.

In the Salon excerpt of your book, you write about how people feel they can be more of an asshole on a blog than they could in line at the DMV. And then you write, "While these activities don't generally inflict the personal injuries that assholism can at work or school, it can be enormously destructive of the fabric of public life." What is the destruction it brings into public life?Because it percolates into public discourse, a place where there have always been constraints. And assholism gives politicians on both sides—and particularly on the right—the opportunity to depict the other sides as assholes, so that their followers have the pleasure of being assholes back at them.

"It used to be that if you wanted to be an asshole, you basically had to write on the wall of the bathroom. Now the whole world is a bathroom wall."

Why particularly on the right?I think it happens on the left now too. History’s rich with styles of assholes, but I think there's a tradition on the right—particularly the populist right—of a certain kind of indignation. Peter Viereck, a writer in the '50s, his critique of modern conservatism was that it was “guilty of causing the emotional deep freeze that makes young people ashamed of generous social impulses,” and that always struck me as a very good characterization of that particular rhetoric.

What are the ramifications for interpersonal communication when there’s this lack of public decency?We have had, historically, a certain language in public life, removed from the language we use in our everyday interactions. But language of everyday interactions has bubbled up into public life, so that you can treat the personalities and issues in public life as if they were no different from the personalities and issues of 11th grade. That idea that there should be a special language and a special set of norms in our public interaction, that's crumbling. Now, it's not crumbling everywhere. It's not crumbling in The New Yorker, The New York Times. It is crumbling in the things that public figures say about each other, whether they're politicians or entertainers, or whatever. And the easy exposure that those remarks get. I mean, Draymond Green has a thought about Kevin Durant, and there it is on Twitter. I'm more concerned about that, frankly. [laughs]

Now, it's been going on for a long time. FDR's fireside chats, the very fact that they were called chats and the idea that he was just sitting there and people were sitting at their hearths, or in their cars. It seemed as if for the first time, the President was intimately speaking, via radio, to every household in America. But if you listen to those chats, the language is, by modern standards, pretty formal. That was impressively informal for them; now it strikes us as quite formal. We expect a much more relaxed, colloquial, intimate kind of language, even from our public figures.

That's a long development, more than a century of informalization—some historians have called it—of public language and public norms. But what's happened lately, due in part to the particular people who have come to the surface and due in part to the media they have at their disposal, that the line between public and private has just dissolved.

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Why is that line important?We have different norms for evaluating things or people in public. Presumably, when we're choosing among Senatorial candidates, it's not the same as when we're choosing kids for our Glee Club. We use different language and different norms. "Billy's stupid," is a perfectly reasonable thing to say about a kid in high school, if he's stupid. It's not a perfectly reasonable thing to say about a Senatorial candidate.

I mean, “stupid” is a really interesting word. Stupid is the first swear word we learn, the first word that your parents tell you not to use. "Don't say stupid." And, Trump’s insults, "loser" and "stupid,” have that intimate, high school, grade school feel to them. I couldn't find any other political figure who had used it—except, I think, Chuck Grassley once called Obama "stupid." People say, “That's a stupid idea” or “this plan is stupid” but they don't call each other stupid in public life. But Trump does, and people do it all the time on these comment threads.

Newspapers and magazines used to be the sort of arbiters of culture in a way. Like, "Here are the things that matter." Now, with the democratization of voice, anyone can chime in to the public discourse. I'm curious what that means, societally, in terms of conveying information.Dictionaries used to be kind of a distillation of the language of high brow culture, back when we had brows: high, middle, and low. Those brows were shaven somewhere around 1965—they're no more brows. Dictionaries decided, "Now, we're just going to record everything." Within 10 years, dictionaries were happily recording everything. I mean, Homer Simpson's “D’oh" is in the Oxford Dictionary.

But, now, you have people saying, "Hey, words matter." When they're going to the dictionary to find out what a word means, it's important to them. When somebody says “alternative facts,” they want to know what facts mean. I'm thinking, "If you say words matter, you mean there are right ways and wrong ways to use words." That contradicts the kind of descriptive, anything-goes ethos that you adopted in the 1960s. “Words matter” means “use a word correctly;” and “use words correctly” implies a source of cultural authority: "This is how you use that word. This is how you not use that word."

"If you're the sort of person to ignore the rules of capitalization, what other rules would you ignore?"

What responsibility do we have to consider a word's historical context when we use it?Look at “nationalist.” After Trump said, "I'm a nationalist," his guys were going and citing the dictionary: "Well, it means love of your country, blah, blah, blah. What's wrong with that?" What's wrong with that is Nazi Germany. This word “nationalist” has got a lot of shit stains on its boots. The dictionary doesn't include that. This happens over and over again with the language in public life. People say, “Black/white racism and white/black racism are the same thing,” where, historically, it's not quite like that. I think people are looking for a kind of cultural authority to do that for them. They want language to be used in a certain way in public life. They want to be able to call people on their misuse of language.

If you'll cast your mind back to Johnson’s Dictionary in 1755: in the early 18th century, you have all these people saying, "The language is falling apart. It's changing too rapidly. We have neither chart nor compass.” And Samuel Johnson says, "Okay, I'm going to give you a dictionary. This dictionary will show how you can take quotations from people, abstract away from them, create a definition that determines the correct use of the word, and ascertain whether the word is being used right or not." In a certain sense, that settles the anxiety people have about letting public opinion take the cultural role that had been traditionally held by the aristocracy—the church, Parliament, the universities, and so on—and let public opinion do that.

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If you give that authority to public opinion, you have to have a way of holding public discourse to certain standards… The way people get upset with the way Trump uses language is kind of a stand in for all the ways that Trump upsets them in general. If you're the sort of person to ignore the rules of capitalization, what other rules would you ignore?

What happens to words that are increasingly overused?I’m thinking about a word like “toxic.”Toxic is one of those words, that had a moment, and it's widely applied. It loses the connection to toxicity that it originally had. And that's a natural process. That routinely happens with words. They are overused, like everything else, like style or fashion.

“Socialism” is a very interesting word in play now, and everybody has an interest in misappropriating it. It sort of belonged to the right since 1920, and they had this Marxist view of it. And you get these kids who are starting to describe themselves as socialists. I got a kid who said to me the other day, “Socialism is cool.” That's really interesting, because cool is when something is new and shiny. In Britain, people don't think socialism is cool, because they've always had socialism. And if you say, "I'm a socialist," you're saying I'm a socialist like George Orwell or The Clash.

In the US, what they mean is kind of a New Deal democrat. With the exception of a few lefties, they don't mean anything different than, “I'm a progressive.” In the surveys they say, “Oh, I'm in favor of universal healthcare and free college tuition,” but nothing that progressives and liberals haven't been in favor of all along. It's rebranding an old concept—like the Mini Cooper, this cool car from the '60s that they rebranded, put a BMW engine in it, and it becomes cool again.

For the republicans, it's as if the kids who call themselves socialists are validating what they've always said: "See, we've always said that Medicare was socialist and now these people are [proving it]." But it doesn't mean that. They're not socialists in any historical sense of the word. So to say there are millions of millennial socialists is to misrepresent [what’s happening], because they're not really socialists.

And then you have "capitalist" on the other side. You have all these people like Elizabeth Warren saying, "I'm not a socialist, I'm a capitalist." But we never use "capitalist" to mean somebody who believes in capitalism. In 2010, people under 30—the Gen Xer's—68% had a positive view of capitalism. Now with the millennials, it's 44%. That's an extraordinary shift in just ten years. But then you ask [Millennials] about free enterprise and it's a 75% approval. They don't like capitalism, but they're okay with with free enterprise. “Capitalism” doesn't mean capitalism—it doesn't mean "market system." It means rich assholes.

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